While trying to solve a raging performance issue, an operating system administrator told me, in front of his manager, that there was no operating system bottleneck. He flatly and coldly stated, "The problem is all Oracle!" Well, unless the speed of light is not fast enough or there is a block or locking issue somewhere, there will be an operating system bottleneck.

The good news is there are only four areas, or subsystems as I like to call them, to investigate, and it's very easy to detect the problem area. The four subsystems are CPU, memory, IO, and network. One of those subsystems is suffering.

Using only standard Linux/Unix tools, along with some Oracle performance views, you can find the operating system bottleneck. If you're a Windows DBA, don't worry. At our level, the concepts and terms are very familiar. You'll know which statistic you need to get. You'll just need to find the tool that provides the statistic.